


Work This Out

by denimdisaster



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, kinda???, n then there r mentions of peggy n angie n tony too, so idk how to tag it, theres a cat, theres some blood stuff but its not real ???, this fic is such a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 18:38:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7695109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/denimdisaster/pseuds/denimdisaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve wakes up in the middle of the night to a sight he never thought he would see again.</p><p>Bucky doing laundry with a kitten in his hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Work This Out

**Author's Note:**

> YES THE TITLE IS A HSM JOKE  
> its so corny but this fic is for sammy n i know how much she loves hsm ;)
> 
> honestly please skim this fic instead of reading it thoroughly its so Messy  
> i made the (oh so common why do i Always do this) mistake of adding _relatable_ stuff that made this fic the fuckup that it is and well. sighs
> 
> anyways! happy birthday sam <3333

He woke up with a strangled gasp in a voice that should not have been as rough as it was.  
  
The details of his nightmare were fuzzy, but he remembered someone falling - _Bucky falling, slipping out of his grip and out of reach, falling to his death_... He shook his head. Bucky was alive, and as well as one would expect of someone who was up until recently regularly tortured. _Breathe. Slowly, slowly, count to five. See, punk, you've got it_! He let out a shaky breath that hurt his throat way more than it should have. He tried to swallow. Couldn't.  
  
Breathing through his nose in an attempt not to rasp his dry throat more than necessary, he made his way to the kitchen through the looming shadows that framed the hallways. Everything seemed sharper in the dark. More intimidating. Perhaps it was a bit silly that _Captain America_ of all people would be afraid of the dark - but at home, he was not Captain America. He was just a scared boy from Brooklyn whose mother read him bedstories and died in the dark, with only the dim light of the kerosene light on her nightstand to illuminate the pale sickness that was her body. He was born from the darkness, the shady streets of Brooklyn, a dark past, and yet he never quite managed to get over his uneasiness regarding it. Tony had informed him that scientifically, darkness as a concept did not exist in the way one thought, only a _lack of light_ , and Steve Rogers _hated it_.  
  
He had been told many times that he was bright, a star, but not even he could chase away the dark. Keep it at bay, perhaps, but it would always and resentlessly return and there was nothing he could do about it.  
  
He told Bucky about it once. He had laughed, telling him not to worry so much, but he had also stayed with him the following nights to ensure his comfort, sharing his warmth the way they used to during the cold nights of Brooklyns winter.  
  
He fumbles with the light switch the second he enters the kitchen. He is well out of range for any of the others to see and be bothered by it, so he can turn it on without feeling guilty. It takes a few seconds of panicked fumbling, somehow managing to convince himself of all the ghosts around and making his heart race before he is able to switch it on. A wave of relief washes over him and his heart instantly feels lighter. The glasses of cold water he had which made him able to breathe normally helped too, but everything became _clearer_ in light and his head did not swim quite as much.  
  
The buzzing noise of an electrical machine went unnoticed by him for far longer than he would have thought. He always prided himself on being observant, but he had been so deep in thought that he didn't notice the sound until the train of thought was finished. He guarded himself with one of the baseball bats Sam collected (and left all over the place, despite claiming that they were valuable and important). Just in case.  
  
The noise seemed to stem from the laundry room, and as he turned the corner he could see light emitting out of it. He sighed in relief. Perhaps it was just one of the Avengers, finally taking care of the gigantic laundry piles.  
  
Or perhaps it was a HYDRA agent, making their way through the window and using the washing machine to mask the sound of them planting their weapons in a dirty scheme to kill them all...  
He braced himself and opened the door.  
  
  
_Bucky_.  
  
  
Technically he knew that Bucky had problems sleeping, that he sometimes walked around and did... things to stay awake instead of sleeping, but he never really saw it in action. On the days he didn't sleep - thanks to his superbody, quite a few - Bucky always seemed to be out somewhere. Perhaps he just spent most of his nights outside the building. Steve could understand that - the tower was alien enough during the day, and much more so during the night. Too big, too shiny, too expensisve. Too unlike the shitty apartment he and Bucky used to share for a couple of bucks a month.  
  
It shouldn't be surprising that Bucky was the one walking around, nor should it be worrying in any way. But there was something suspicious about the way he moved, with caution and care, as if he was hiding something. Or perhaps he was injured.  
  
Steves stomach turned at the thought of something happening to to Bucky - _his Bucky_. The thought of him hurting from an unknown injury all too easily played images into his head - maybe he had been struck by a petty pickpocketer while walking outside, head hurting from being hit with a steel pipe, or maybe, maybe a HYDRA assassin _had_ been here after all, and had managed to do something to him; stabbing, perhaps he had been stabbed. Or sliced. He could picture it, an unknown figure standing over his Bucky, the sharp knife tearing the skin, the flesh, all the way to the bone, down, down. Bucky coughing up blood; a punctured lung, struggling to breathe, and the red, red blood; spilling out of his stomach, his bleeding organs, his blood soaked clothes, blackening on the floor-  
  
He shook his head. His therapist had told him that he needed to stop these trains of thought. That they only made it worse, made him see things that weren't there, made him paranoid.  
  
But what he was imagining wasn't unlikely at all. Bucky had been a HYDRA agent, the Winter Soldier, and it wouldn't be surprising to have the, come after him; with a gun, maybe, firing at his heart but hitting his side. Bucky running, trying to get home, or crawling, stumbling - or maybe he tried to fight back, his only weapon being brute strength, and Steve being blissfully unaware of all of it. He could see it in front of him, having seen it before, shattered bones and blood on the street, the smell of gunpowder mixing with the harsh stank of blood and gall, the deafening silence clogging up-  
  
A soft 'meow' broke the silence and forced Steve back to reality.  
  
There was a small calico kitten poking its head out from under Buckys jacket. It was shabby and dirty and looked like it had been dragged through every alleyway in New York - just like Bucky, actually, _what had he been up to?_ -, and it looked startingly out of place in the shiny apartment. And yet, when Bucky patted its head and mumbled for it to get back in under his jacket, Steve thought the scene felt familiar, as if this wasn't out of place at all. He couldn't help the relieved laugh that escaped him. His therapist was right. All of his worries and paranoia and the source of his anxiety turned out to be nothing but a muddy kitten.  
  
Bucky turned to look at him.  
  
"Steve?" He asked with a frown. "What are you doing here?"  
  
He looked from Bucky to the cat to the washing machine and so back to Bucky again. The floor was muddy with Buckys dirty footprints, water dripping from soaked clothes onto the previously shiningly clean floor. There were so many questions he wanted to ask him; Where he had been, why he didn't sleep, where the damn cat came from, if he was okay. But he didn't. Knew that Bucky didn't like him fretting over him, prying into his life (as if he didn't have the right, after all they had been through).  
  
"Me? What are _you_ doing here, Buck? It's _late_."  
  
Bucky shrugged and looked away. "Couldn't sleep, felt like doing something useful. That's all."  
  
Steve knew that it wasn't the full truth. But he wasn't going to push it. Not now. He was way too tired for this anyways.  
  
"And your first thought was... Laundry? Not taking care of your little buddy there?" He asked and nodded towards the kitten.  
  
Bucky instinctively drew the jacket closer around him to protect it, making the cat meow in protest of being squished. He let go of the jacket with a jerk.  
  
"Hey, Bucks, careful," Steve said and caught the kitten, dangling from the fodder and struggling to keep itself up without Bucky holding it in place.  
The kitten was tiny, so, so, tiny in his hands, and he had the disgusting, intrusive thought that he could easily crush its skull with his thumbs. He handed it back to Bucky with an uncomfortable sense of shame.  
  
"Where'd you even get it?" He asked him, ignoring the feeling.  
  
Bucky shrugged again, though with more care for the tiny cat in his hands this time. He stared at it with a strange curiousity, bordering on fondness, in his eyes and he raised a finger to lightly pet it. It purred in response and Bucky looked so taken by it that Steve began to wonder if he was ever going to get an answer to his question. It didn't matter. He knew that Bucky did that sometimes - got asked a question and forgot it as he thought about the answer. He assumed it must be a side effect of what they - HYDRA - did to him. He didn't bring it up.  
  
"I was... Out," Bucky replied after a while, throwing Steve a wary look to decide whether or not he was going to question it. He bit his cheek. Not today, he wouldn't pry. He wabed for him to continue.  
  
"I... Happened to be in an alley-"  
  
"What were you-" Steve stopped himself. He had promised not to get into it.  
"Go on," he said.  
  
"I found her in a trash can," Bucky said. "She'd probably been hiding because of the gunshots-"  
  
"The _gunshots?!_ " He shouted. "Gunshots, Bucky?" He knew it, he knew it, had known it from the start, something bad was going to happen - there was no way people wouldn't come after him, sooner or later, despite Nick Fury and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. swearing to protect them. He felt the dread creep up from his stomach and into his throat until it was so filled with it it made his eyes water. He swallowed, and swallowed, but with it came the imaginative taste of blood in his mouth and suddenly his throat was warm with the thick, iron-flavored feeling of worry and he _knew_ this was a hallucination of some kind but he didn't know how to stop it. _Gunshots_. Bucky had been _shot at_ and he'd been sleeping inside a locked up tower. His knees felt weak but he stablilized himself against one of the many washing machines Tony had placed in here, suddenly grateful for the overflow. He took a deep breath. _Count backwards from twenty, slowly_ , his therapist had told him. He could do that. _Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen..._  
"Steve?" Bucky asked him.  
  
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Just a little, ah, stuff acting up." He excused himself with a cheeky grin and sheepishly scratched his neck while the knuckles on his other hand turned white from having to support all of him on its own. He could still taste the damned blood in his way too dry mouth. Didn't he drink water earlier?  
  
"Stop it, Steve, I know-"  
  
"Really, Bucks, it's alright. Worry doesn't suit you, you know."  
  
Bucky furrowed his eyebrows and it was clear that he didn't believe him. But he knew the unspoken rules - if Steve didn't get to pry, what right did he have to do it? So he shook his head and ignored it, swept it under the rug along with the rest of their problems. One day. Not today.  
  
"They weren't firing at me, you know," came Bucky's soft, quiet voice, cutting through the stretched silence. Steve blinked.  
  
"Oh?"  
  
"Hey, don't sound so surprised, punk," Bucky said with a tiny smile - a smirk, really -, and there was a glimpse of who he had been _before_ , when they were both scrawny teenagers, himself much more so than Sergeant James Bucchanan Barnes, when they were scared and lonely and only had each other. It made his heart ache to think about.  
  
He laughed instead, in relief and to chase away the thoughts of who Bucky _used to be_. He knew there was no use in thinking that way. Bucky was never going to be completely the same - but neither was he. They'd both changed, for better or for worse, and there was no use in debating what could have been or reminiscing over the past.  
  
"Sorry, sorry. Did you see the shooters?"  
  
Bucky shook his head. "Heard them. Gang dispute, I think."  
  
"Ah, well..." Steve didn't know what to say. "I'm glad you're not hurt," he settled for, after a few moments of silence. Bucky didn't seem to mind. But it was hard to know with Bucky these days, the tiny signals were easy to miss and though Steve liked to pride himself on being observant there were times where a tiny frown was missed or a smile was interpreted the wrong way by him.  
  
"What are you washing, by the way?" He asked in an attempt to clear the air of the awkward silence that was stretching between them.  
  
A shrug. "Just a little of this n' that, what I found lying around."  
  
"I didn't even know you knew how to work one of these out," he said and tapped the washing machine closest to him, pushing himself off it as the strength returned to his legs.  
  
"You just need to push some buttons and it starts," Bucky said.  
  
Steve blinked. "You do know that all the buttons do different things... right?"  
  
Bucky rolled his eyes, actually rolled his eyes in such a familiar fashion Steve almost burst out laughing - or crying, he didn't know which - with nostalgia. He hadn't seen him roll his eyes since 1942.  
  
"They all make the machine wash your clothes. What does it matter which ones I press?"  
  
He chuckled. "You're right, I guess..." No need to start lecturing him _now_. "Though I think the cat needs to be washed almost more than the clothes. It's all muddy, Buck."  
  
Bucky's gaze flickered down to the cat in his hands and for what looked to be the first time he considered the fact that the kitten was _dirty_.  
  
"Oh," he said.  
  
"Oh," Steve agreed. "Come on, let's bring it to the bathroom."  
  
  
Bucky trudged after him to the bathroom without a word, his clothes dripping mud and rainwater onto the clean apartment floor. Steve decided not to comment on it - the fact that he had remembered to take off his shoes when they exited the washing room was good enough.  
  
He opened a cabinet and found fourty different brands of schampoo staring back at him. Another was filled to the brim with conditioner, two with showering gel, both liquid and bar soap, one with nail care and one for body lotion and shea butter. And that didn't even _begin_ to cover the other cabinets and drawers, the ones he didn't open because he finally found what he was looking for.  
  
It didn't take too long to fill the bucket either since Tony had kindly enough stored a gardening hose in there, and, Steve didn't know whether or not he should be surprised, there were fifteen different kinds of animal schampoo in the liquid soap cabinet. Surprised because they should have been with the rest of the schampoos, unsurprised because honestly, Tonys sense of order was... Odd. Steve placed the bottle of lizard schampoo back on the shelf. Did you even need to bathe lizards? It seemed like something Moms Against Vaccines And Gluten would do. Well, it wasn't any of his business. Tony _was_ a man of science, after all...  
  
The cat meowed in protest as they put it in the water and Bucky had to hold it in place for it to be still, mumbling soft words and stroking its head. It felt out of place to see the Winter Soldier petting a kitten with an arm made of metal, but it felt achingly familiar to see Bucky doing it, used to the image of him helping Steve take care of the strays he insisted on keeping. The cat hissed as he accidentally got soap in its mouth and he recoiled, quickly washing it away with a quiet apology. It was just hard to concentrate on washing the kitten when Bucky was _like that_.  
  
Bucky insisted on Steve drying the cat. He didn't want to do it with his metal arm, after all, afraid of hurting the stray like so many things before. It honestly tugged on his heartstrings to have him admit it through staring at the floor and the sad look in his eyes.  
  
But it was hard for him too. He _still_ felt weird in this body despite all the time he had spent in it and he didn't quite trust himself with fine tasks like this; he still surprised himself with his strength. The phone catalogue incident was still fresh in his mind and he didn't want something like that happening to something that was _alive_.  
  
He didn't exactly have a choice, though, and he dried off the kitten with stiff, careful movements. It felt so small, understandably way smaller than he remembered cats feeling like back in Brooklyn, and he knew that if he just squeezed a little the life would leave it.. It felt strangely nostalgic and sad that he couldn't even handle a _cat_ , no matter how pathetic it was to be upset over such a thing, but he pushed away the feeling with a frown and concentrated on drying the kitten. He was like this because he had to be, and given the choice to do it again he _would_.  
  
Steve handed it over to Bucky again. It was a bit reckless to do so seeing as how Bucky couldn't even feel that cat with one of his arms, but it felt relieving to not be responsible for it anymore. He emptied the bucket in the sink. He absentmindedly noted the glowing red digits on the washing machine, but it didn't strike him that they meant something until a moment later when he snapped his head back to them. They blinked a glaring, angry 3:42.  
  
"Bucky, Bucks, we should go to sleep," he said.  
  
He looked up from where he was tickling the kittens ears. Looked over to the numbers Steve was pointing at. Nodded even though he wasn't sure Bucky knew what the numbers meant.  
  
He took his hand, being careful not to disturb the cat as he dragged Bucky to the hallway. It was still horribly dark and he threaded carefully, watched as his feet, legs, body, were absorbed by the darkness that surrounded them. His breaths were shallow - the thought of not swallowing as much of the darkness as he would with regular breaths was kind of comforting, even if he still held Buckys metal arm in a strong grip.  
He stopped outside the doors that led to their rooms. Perhaps he should... He bit his lip.  
  
"You know, Bucky, I..." He stopped himself. Fixed his gaze to the painting that hung on the wall that separated his and Buckys room - a mellow thing, a helpless girl in a field of grass in a sad shade of brown. Tony had told him it was an expensive painting and gifted it to him as some kind of inspiration - for what, Steve didn't know. He worked with coal and portraits.  
  
"I know." Bucky shook his arm free of his weak grip. "Let's go sleep." And with those words he turned around and entered Steves room, kitten purring in his flesh hand. Steve almost laughed in relief. Of course he knew.  
  
"Change out of your clothes first," he mumbled with affection in his voice, remembering that they were dirty. He didn't know whether or not Bucky heard him. He couldn't bring it in him to care.  
  
They may not be perfect, and it may not be as it used to be, with 70 years of changes between them, but through everything they were still _them_. Noone knew him quite like Bucky did.  
  
And if he had the option to go back and change it, to redo their story to save him the heartbreak, he _wouldn't_.  


  
"Steve?!"  
  
He woke up to screaming. It was never a good way to start the mornings, regardless of whether it was an alarm or just Sam being angry. He blinked. Bucky was intertwined with him, also he blinking the sleep out of his eyes, and the clock on his nightstand showed a 7:31. He untangled his hand from Bucky to run it over his face. _What now_.  
  
"'T is it, Sam?" He slurred with his voice thick of sleep. Something furry tickled his feet and he giggled, making Bucky stare at him with an owlish look in his eyes.  
  
"The cat," he whispered to him. Bucky nodded in understanding and leaned back. The sunshine from the far too thin window panels hit his face then, making him squint and the sunrays light up his hair, eyes, face. It should deter him to see him like that, the bags under his eyes highlighted and the palor of his skin shining through, but it didn't. It just reminded him of what Bucky had always been - light, warmth. His chest felt too tight for his heart and he looked away.  
  
Sam came barging into his room. If he was any bit of surprised at the two of them sharing a bed he didn't show it, instead choosing to hold up a basket of - _oh_.  
  
"Oh," Steve said, voicing his thoughts. Bucky let out a soft breath.  
  
"Yes, Steve, 'oh'. What did you do to my _clothes_?!"  
  
"Hey, it wasn't me!" He protested and winced as Sams eyes narrowed in on Bucky.  
  
"What the fuck did you do, Bucky?!" He yelled.  
  
Steve turned his head to look at him and caught a glimpse of him just as he jumped off the bed and out of the window.  
  
"Come back here, asshole! I have a meeting today!" Sam screamed after him and threw his shoe at Buckys running form. Steve was actually really impressed that he hit him.  
  
"What's the problem, Sam?" He asked with a shaky smile as he looked at the laundry basket.  
  
"The problem?!" Sam whipped his head around to glare at him and he recoiled, not wanting to anger him further. "The problem, Cap, is that your boyfriend managed to not only shrink my clothes, but also make them all _pink_!"  
  
"Pink suits you though," he said and licked his lips. "Compliments your complexion."  
  
Sam crossed his arms. "I mean, yeah, you're right but... They're all too small! At least two sizes!" He frowned, but the terrifying anger seemed to have left him and Steve let go of the tension he'd been holding in his shoulders.  
  
"It's not that bad, Sam. This way everyone will see how," he paused to add quotation marks, "'ripped' you are." He hoped that that was what the teenagers he'd seen in the park had meant with the word.  
  
It seemed like it was, given how Sam raised his eyebrows and rubbed his chin with a pleased smile.  
  
"You know what, you're not that shabby, big guy," he said and punched his shoulder, lingering a little to feel his muscles. Steve didn't complain - in all honesty, it had become a piece of his regular life at this point.  
  
"Thanks," he said and lifted an eyebrow at the statement.  
  
"Didn't you have a meeting, by the way?" He asked him. Sams eyes grew wide and he withdrew his hand as quickly and suddenly as if he had been burned.  
  
"Shit, shit shit, I.. Fuck!" He swore and stormed out of the room, grabbing something from the basket. Steve couldn't help but laugh at him.  
  
A meow from somewhere in the laundry made him turn his attention to it and he lifted some kind of shirt - skirt? Pants? He honestly couldn't tell - from the basket, exposing the kitten Bucky had found last night. In daylight it felt less vulnerable, with its claws and determined eyes. He held out his hand. To his delight, the kitten climbed onto it, sinking its claws into his palm. Steve tried his best not to wince, but when it stabbed the pad of his thumb with its sharp claws he had to lift it up and hold it against his chest instead, one hand under it to keep it from falling and one at its neck to hold it in place.  
  
"Are you hungry, little guy?" He said. The cat meowed as if it could hear him.  
  
"Let's get you something to eat, then," he laughed. Tony would no doubt yell at them for keeping the cat around, but right now, it didn't matter too much. If Bucky wanted to keep it then they would. No matter what anyone else said. After all, what made Bucky happy made _him_ happy and a kitten wasn't really a big sacrifice for their happiness and recovery.  
  
"Is he gone?" Bucky whispered from the windowsill. Steve nodded.  
  
"Hasn't been for very long though, so be quiet. He's probably still-" A door slammed shut and Sams array of cusswords was cut short. "Never mind. You can come in."  
  
Bucky climbed in with the grace of a cat and landed more silently than one. It was quite the impressive feat with a metal arm and combat boots, and Steve had to remind himself that this had probably been part of his training. Still, it was impressive, even if his stomach turned a little when he thought about the origins of the skill.  
  
"The cat needs a name," he said as he tossed Steve a sandwich - that he managed to catch with the hand that had been holding the cats neck - and took a bite of his own. The kitten meowed at the smell and Bucky pulled out some kind of catfood from one of the 29984 pockets in his clothes.  
  
"Hey, when'd you get this?" He asked.  
  
"Just now," he replied. "The cat needs a name."  
  
"Yeah, it does, but..." He put the cat down on the bed and unwrapped his sandwhich. The label on the wrapping made him halt in his movements. "Aphrodites? That's on the other end of the city, Buck! How'd you get there in time?"  
  
Bucky shrugged and swallowed a mouthful of his food. "There's a 15 or so motorcycles in the garage. Just took one of 'em."  
  
"I didn't know you had a key," Steve said and he couldn't quite hide the surprise in his voice."   
"I don't," Bucky replied.  
  
"Oh."  
  
He ate his sandwich quietly and contently. They were as good as always, the family recipe being older than him. It warmed his heart that Bucky still remembered his favourite diner.  
  
Bucky crumpled up his paper and threw it somewhere in the room. A part of Steve wanted to disagree and tell him to pick it up, but the larger, happy part of him told him to let it be for now. He'd just pick it up later.  
  
"Peggy," Bucky said.  
  
"What?" Steve whispered. What was he getting at?  
  
"It's a pretty name," he said. "Or Angie... They feel familiar, somehow? Think either of ' em would fit her?" He gestured towards the kitten.  
  
Steve swallowed his discomfort and took a bite of the sandwich. He remembered he'd shown Peggy the place too, after his first mission. She'd been just as delighted as he had been the first time he and Bucky had went there together, but she'd let him know with a secretive whisper that Angie Martinelli would have her head if she stopped visiting the diner she worked at.  
  
"And," she had said with a sly smile, "it's bad enough that she has my heart, isn't it?"  
  
He opened the can of catfood and gave it to the kitten, not looking at Bucky.  
  
"You know it's a girl, then?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
He scratched the cat behind its ears. "I think... That if you want to name her either of those," he said and risked a glance at Bucky's face, "you'll need another one that matches. It doesn't feel right to separate Peggy and Angie," he said, not able to stop the sadness from seeping into his voice.  
  
He seemed confused, and Steve was just about to speak up and apologize for his weird behavior when Bucky broke the silence.  
  
"You're right," he said.  
  
He blinked. "What?"  
  
He cleared his throat. "It doesn't feel like they should be apart. We'll name this one Angie and we'll pick up another one that we'll call Peggy." Bucky wasn't looking at him, Steve noticed, but instead at his fingers where they were scratching the kittens - _Angies_ \- ears. He smiled. It would take some getting used to, hearing those names around the apartment again, but he could work with it. If Bucky thought it would be nice, it probably would.  
  
"Alright," he said. "She can't very well be alone during the days anyways, can she?"  
  
Bucky blinked. His eyes sparkled and he stood up, looking down at Steve and Angie and back to Steve again.  
  
"I'll be back soon," he said.  
  
Steve nodded to give him the permission he was waiting for, and Bucky gave him a small smile before climbing out of the window again.  
  
He looked down at the kitten, smiling at the yawn she gave him.  
  
"Angie," he tried. His voice broke a little and he frowned. "Angie. Angie, Angie, Angie." The kitten looked at him with curious eyes. "Angie," he said, bending down to look for some kind of reaction from her. She licked his nose. Then she laid down and curled in on herself, immediately falling asleep. He blinked at her and let out a breathy laugh that was more like a giggle than he'd ever admit.  
  
  
His therapist would be pleased, he realized when he was going to bed that night, that he wasn't running from the past anymore.  
And with the calico kitten named Angie and the brown, striped kitten named Peggy nestled in between him and Bucky, he finally felt as if he was ready to accept and move forward.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> its kinda ooc but whatever man  
> the painting is "christina's world" by andrew wyeth, btw  
> thanks for reading!!! <3


End file.
